Orpheus
by FPB
Summary: Ages have gone. Gods have risen and fallen. But Athena, who is now the queen of all the gods of Olympus, has never forgotten the first of musicians of an age past. A memory of power.


ORPHEUS

By F.P.Barbieri

Yes, said great Athena to the Silver Angel. I remember Orpheus.

It was a fine long afternoon; the armour had fallen silent, and the gold-haired little musician had sat at the foot of her queen and played as the mind moved her. And then, when the music had come to a final end, and could not be recovered without anti-climax, she asked her sovereign about the master musician of another age; for she was curious, and too young.

He - said the queen, as the light of the falling sun found highlights in her black hair and a breath of wind shook its tiniest strands - he was a tall, handsome creature, strong and wiry. I remember his long loose stride, like a camel; I suppose all his descendants had to learn it - all those singers who wander from court to court. His home was the wind.

There is one thing most people do not realize: he was not a mortal man. He was born from one of the Muses, and his wife Euridice was a tree-spirit; they were both of that extraordinary generation when we children of Heaven lived on Earth for a while, and heroes were born. He was of our blood, and sometimes I would stop in my wanderings on Earth to hear him sing. He was the first who awakened the sense of music in me.

Gifts are something you cannot account for. Orpheus was unique. He had a magnificent voice, with an extraordinary range, which he could modulate into any key at will and switch suddenly from the most raging fortissimo to the most delicate whisper without losing truth.

But that is the least of it, little princess: that is only the instrument. What was really staggering was the mind that went with it, the use he knew how to make of his powers. He could sing about _anything_ and hold any audience entranced; he could make any subject fascinating. My brother Apollo taught him, as he did many of the eldest poets, and told me later he had never had such a scholar.

The mysteries of Apollo's power are lost with him. If any god has a share in them, you have; I have not. I do not know where art and beauty are born in gods and men. The closest I can come to explaining his talent was his passionate nature. His mind seized on things with fire and longing and love; he could not see anything without being involved in its nature.

And so he fell in love. It was no small creature he loved, but Euridice, a spirit of the oak, greatest of trees. To win her was a heroic enterprise, to which two mighty spirits had bent their will. For Orpheus had a rival, and he could not have had a nobler. Aristaeus, around whom bees swarmed like little golden stars, had followed his swarm once, and seen her in the shadow of her tree, noble and beautiful like a silken banner.

Who was he? O my child in Olympus, Aristaeus was one of the first heroes, and one of the greatest. Before Prometheus brought down fire from Olympus and Dionysos fermented wine from the grapes, Aristaeus, the shepherd of bees, had given men honey and mead: the first to give mortals sweetness, the first to give fire and intoxication, the first to open them the world of the Gods -

- and at this point, the smaller, golden-haired goddess turned her wide blue eyes to the great figure on the throne. Prometheus, Dionysos, I know; but, my lady, I never heard of Aristaeus.

Yes, princess; yes, indeed. You heard of them because they suffered. Prometheus was fiercely punished for his presumption, and even Dionysos, beloved child of Zeus, had to die for sharing wine with mortals. But why do you think Aristaeus went unpunished? _I tell you he paid worse than the others_...

I was barely born myself then, but I was in my father's counsels; and I sat by him when he moved the mind of the bees. It was by Zeus' counsel that the swarm nested in the branches of Eurydice's oak, for he had seen the mind of Aristaeus, and he knew that he could not see the nymph without loving her. Terrible were the counsels of my father, and dark, and hidden. For Aristaeus, he had prepared something that was more death than Dionysos' death, more fire than Prometheus' fire.

In those days, when the children of gods met, male and female, they knew each other, and were with each other for the rest of their lives. There was no unrequited love. But whether because of some wound in his nature, or because he had been guilty of presumption against Zeus, or because time was growing old and the virtue of youth was leaving the world, Aristaeus grew desperate for a woman he could not have. The Fates had meant Eurydice and Orpheus for each other, and Zeus knew it; but he drove Aristaeus to her as... no, no, I can't say it.

(The small golden-haired warrior shuddered slightly and looked up to her queen, not raising her head, but through her eyelashes; and the blue eyes saw in her face the shadow of the thing Athena hates - human sacrifice. Then her voice began again.)

It was the Age of Gold, she said. (And even in the few syllables, the princess at the foot of the throne heard the regret for a beautiful youth; and the doubt, wandering like a ghost at the back of the memory, that Zeus was even then... the Silver Angel's mind fell silent, and she started listening again.)

In the Age of Gold, seasons followed each other with equal and even beauty; but even among these, there was nothing like the first blossoms of spring. You could sit and hear the song of their opening, one by one, like shy little stars of many colours; as the melted snow flowed and sang in rivers, and one by one, louder and louder, near and far, gentle and gay, all the birds started their music as the sun strode across the sky, lighting each puff of cloud with white and gold and pink. It had been fine and sweet, in the winter, to be one with the force of snow and ice, and to feel, when it was given to you, the exquisite blue beauty of a sunlit winter sky; but how much better, how like the dance of strength and grace in the veins of the gods themselves, to feel the life of the world quicken as its hearts beat faster and faster, to breathe a clean new air. You hear so much of sweet zephyrs in the songs of the poets, children of Orpheus; but, my dear, in his time you would have known what they were really like...

For three years Aristaeus had loved the spirit of the oak in vain. He had brewed the sweet mead and learned wisdom from his busy golden maids, who flew over the fields and told him many stories of animals and their gods, of the powers whose hearts beat in the tiny blades of grass and blossomed in tender little petals and shone the sun's own light back to him. And it is true, my dear, that the very stars would have come and loved him for the sweet mead that he brewed, and its wonderful spirit; I myself sometimes came, and taught him some wisdom in exchange for a draught of it.

But I came, too, because I felt sorry for him; even before I could know that there could be something for which to feel sorry, since pain and loss had not yet become realities to the children of Zeus. I did not even know what I felt then, because the concept had not yet become tangible - sympathy; fellow-feeling for a fellow creature in inescapable distress. For all I know even now, Aristaeus was the first of the generation of heroes to suffer a suffering that could not be healed, could not be repaired, could not be cancelled; and I knew it then, though I did not know what I knew.

Love is still a stranger to me now; but I knew even then that he loved what he could never have, that the most central thing in him was vested in the spirit of the oak. He loved it, and yet his luminous mead, loved by gods and men, could breathe no life in it - could not make the spirit hidden in the wood breathe back at him, and speak, and respond to him. Love is still a stranger to me now; but I know, as I am the goddess of knowledge, the terrible thing that is to have the core of all your thoughts and affections vested outside yourself, and have nothing in return. (Hold well the love thou hast won, my little heroine, and never cease from gratitude!)

But there was word for it, and mastery, in the world as it was when we immortals had only started to visit and change it. I myself spent little of my time with Aristaeus, but more and more with Orpheus. I saw that his song was teaching everyone around him to see, and so I learned two things; to look again at the thing he sang of, and to watch how all other creatures reacted, each after its fashion, to his songs. I have always sought wisdom and loved her like a sister; but without the song of Orpheus I would never have paid enough attention to many things. For everything he saw, he sang about; and everything he sang was true and beautiful.

But to other creatures, I could see, his voice acted not as a revelation but as a peace; they sat, and grew calm and untroubled, like the gods at rest. And yet I could see that they took no wisdom away from it; it came over them like a possession, and left them, in the end, almost the same natures with which they had come. I realized that the song placed them in touch with the deepest truths about the world, connected them with the universe they lived in, even while they were not awake to it; but living as they did as it were in a walking sleep, having not enough wideawake wits - the strength of the impression died with the impression itself, being replaced by other impressions as soon as they saw or heard anything else.

And I saw another thing; that even of those who did not lose the song as soon as it ended, each was awakened to something slightly different about the truth which it described. I found that there was little so fruitful as to find out the view and knowledge of each; and so listening and comparing and adding and discussing, one grew wise. But the first truth was always what came with the song. Sometimes I did not travel openly with the following he so often had with him, but took the form of one of them, or flew over them as an owl.

And there is another thing Orpheus was, and that is fearless. There were different kinds of dangers in those days, of course; and men would not willingly come close to a great oak, especially one inhabited by the sacred bees of Aristaeus. But if Orpheus ever regarded either of those things with nervousness (and he was no mortal, remember), his thirst for new and beautiful things to see and sing overcame them; and he drew close. He saw the cloud of golden workers, wise and wonderful; and shining in the shadow of the tree, he saw Euridice.

I was an owl in the oak, and heard it all. You are the princess of music, my child; but if I live twice as long as I have lived, I will never hear finer songs than I heard them. Different perhaps; possibly even as good. But better, never. Orpheus stood and sang of her, of her beauty and majesty, of the proud stern soul of the tree that Zeus himself loved. His words had the shape of the green, twist-edged leaves, of the heavy trunk, of the gnarled root, of the round fat acorns with their wooden caps; he neglected nothing. And the tall and splendid creature stepped out of the branches of her tree, and was his; their marriage witnessed by the whole forest.

And the golden bees buzzed quietly about the oak, subdued by the flow of notes; but they too knew what their master, whom they loved, had lost; and that nowhere in the world was there anything to make up for what he could never have. Like me, they do not know love themselves; but like me, they can see what it is in the spirit and soul of those it touches. Aristaeus sat alone, nursing his broken heart, and listening to the echo of triumphant singing far away.

But his little bees were wise, and angry. They had made their hive in the branches of Euridice's oak, and knew that its goddess had mortally injured their lord. Wherever she went, they pursued her like the shadow of an ancient wrong; and one day, in the attempt to escape their buzzing reproach, her naked foot - not hard as oak, but tender as a young woman's - stepped on a snake. Startled, ignorant, and in pain, the thin mass of muscle and bone reared up with a strange noise; and as the young woman looked down, her flesh yelded to the sharp teeth, with only a little reproach.

Orpheus sat by her dead body for hours, silent as a corpse, and his eyes were like the night into which no mortal can see. The dwellers in the forest, trees, animals and birds, missed his song, that had held them together, like a dark hole in their own beings, and came timidly to seek what was wrong; and, having seen the two figures in their frightful loneliness, they went away again.

Then Orpheus rose and struck one terrible chord on his lyre. The animals shook and whimpered, and a lion bristled his mane and bared his teeth, growling. Nobody had understood that he was beginning a new song; but his voice spread across the forest like unfurled banners, and the sound of it struck ice into the heart of the creatures that heard it. For it spoke of the inevitability of death, of how existence depends on beginning and on ending, of how all finite things must reach their end. All their deaths were his theme, and they cowered and fled.

His song went on, growing across the mountains, covering life and death, bringing the extremes of truth together. He wandered off both like a drunken man and a man bound for a goal: his song led him on, with a terrible clarity, stanza after stanza going deeper and deeper into the mystery of extinction - what his children's child, Plato, was to call the Form of Otherness and Non-being. His song led him on, until he stood alone in front of a great darkness. His eyes, like the night, looked into the darkness, and the darkness looked back.

He entered the abyss. His living feet strode on the path of the dead, among hidden and shameful, sombre and dreadful things. His song drew the shame from its lair and held it up and made it know itself, and his song was yet more sombre and dreadful than the sombre and dreadful, for it brought them all together into a fearsome beauty. The shades stood entranced at the terror of their own terror, and at the strange dignity of their own darkness; and at the infinite, yet unspoken mourning for their infinite loss.

How do I know this? How else? Child, I followed him. I flew after him, my wings beating; and yet not to the end, not to the end. For the thing he had the courage to look in the eye - the ultimate abyss - was too much for me. I have grown strong, and wise, and great, since; I can say that without pride, for it is a fact. And yet my memory shrinks like a whipped cur; I, the goddess of war, armoured from my birth, who thought myself the bravest in Olympus, I whose arms could bring down Ares - I hid and trembled like a terrified owl in daylight.

When I dared look again, the great singer was walking back. He was silent, and a tall shrouded figure followed him, not quite walking. I recognized the tall shape of Euridice; and it took me little to guess, from the fact that he kept his face sternly forwards and did not look right or left, that a task had been lain on him not to look on his beloved until they had both returned to the light.

I could see the tragedy happen almost before it did. As I flew over them, I was the first to be struck by the warmth of the living Hyperion, and to smell the grass. I looked down at Orpheus; not at the person who followed him, for I did not know whether my looking directly at her - as he had been forbidden to do - would breach the prohibition. But he felt the clean air, and, without thinking - without realizing that she was behind him, not yet in the light, not yet among the living - he turned. Her veil flew off, and she looked at him - once; and I saw her eyes. There was no reproach in them, no despair, but finality. There was no going back. And yet she did not blame him; for her glance said more clearly than any words or song that she loved him still, loved him for ever, loved him dead as much as she had loved him alive.

Then she was no more; and I knew that everything had changed. The very flowers smelled different. Hades had not forbidden Orpheus the sight of his wife out of cruelty: to the contrary, he had not wanted that the sight of the wise poet should see the death of his partner, the half of his soul, so that death should leave her being and never enter his. As trees could die, so could she; but he could not, not until he had bound his being - with a link the nobler and deeper the more noble he himself was - to her death. But now he knew her as mortal, and himself, and he could not unknow that. He could have taken her away from death for ever; instead, he handed himself over.

Do you mean he chose to die? - asked the fair-haired princess, who had been listening without a sound. You might call it that, answered the wise queen from under her bright and massive helmet; but living as Orpheus did, when knowledge and will and understanding are one, it is difficult to say that he chose, rather than that his whole being accepted, what was put in front of him. Yes, his flesh and sinews were immortal; and in that sense, it might be said that he could, in theory, have lived for ever. But his being was bound with the dead; one flesh; and to imagine that he would have wanted or been able to live long after she had died, is to imagine the impossible, or rather the absurd.

He only lived long enough to pass on something of what he had seen. In these last days of his life, he became aware of something that had always been true: that his songs were able to teach. He had always made his listeners aware of the things he sang of and described; now he did it consciously. And while in days gone by he had wandered alone among the forests and sang mostly to gods and animals, now he took company with the young men of the mortal race; for it was to them, reasonable animals who had to die, that the truths of life and death he had glimpsed in that darkness from which I had cringed mattered most. But he was terribly frustrated, for he could teach only in similes and metaphors, creating images for things that are beyond describing, and his followers always mistook the images for the truth it was meant to express. Time and time again he tried to explain; only to complicate what seemed to him terribly simple, and trivialize what should have been complex and delicate. He taught them song and story, vision and idea - but never, never managed to make them walk, as he had walked, into the very eye of death.

His death? Many stories are told. For me, it is not important. I was not there, and I am glad of that, for I do not like to preside over the death of heroes I have loved. I am told that it was cruel, but then one can hardly pretend that death is anything else. At any rate, I had seen enough on the moment when he turned back and looked and became a mortal; for everything else that happened to him afterwards was bound up in that one moment.

Athena fell silent, and in the bright sunlight of Olympus, turned her gaze to the Silver Angel. The little warrior princess had bent her blue eyes to her harp, and Athena could see that she was thinking. She smiled, and thought of the day soon to come - perhaps today, perhaps in a week - in which that golden head would turn to her again, and give her, entire and whole, the music she had found in the ancient story; and one more song would ring across the golden halls. She knew that the Silver Angel would not produce her work until it was ready and polished; but she had waited from the beginning of the world to hear this particular song. There was no hurry; in its own good time, it would open to the sun like a new flower, different from anything that had ever been done before, yet rooted in simple universal truths and true to the ancient hero she had followed long ago. For Athena knew the mind of the singer, and delighted in it; and she had told her little soldier this story, just so that she might do - exactly what she was doing.


End file.
